← The Urbanist
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- [00:12]
A
Hello and welcome to the Urbanist, Monocle's program all about the built environment. I'm your host, Andrew Tuck.
- [00:17]
B
Coming up, that's what I feel media should do. Media should stop playing this blaming game and should put their feet on the ground and understand the societies and the communities that we live in.
- [00:31]
A
How can strong city journalism help urban residents and visitors? Today we review some publications and productions that are helping city residents stay informed about the environments where they live, work and play. From a New York based organization helping immigrant communities to navigate city life, to a Portuguese newspaper helping both residents and newcomers in Lisbon, and a podcast looking at the public health implications of modern housing. That's all ahead in the next 30 minutes here on the Urbanist with me, Andrew Tuck. We begin today in New York where an independent non profit newsroom called Documented is helping get important information to immigrant communities in the city. His journalism is published in English, Spanish, Chinese and Haitian Creole. And in 2024, they helped combat wage theft, investigated corruption and exposed exploitation in New York. To find out more about how Documented serves its city, I was joined recently by their co executive director, Mazen Sid Ahmed. I began by asking Mazin about the work that Documented does and how they're funded.
- [01:46]
C
Documented is a non profit news site dedicated to covering New York City's immigrants and the policies that affect their lives. So we were born about seven, eight years ago at this point, 2018, really the conversations around it started in 2017 and really with the goal of providing sustained local coverage of immigration issues and ensuring that immigrant communities were actually the intended readers of the stories and not just the subject of the stories. My co founder, Max Siegelbaum and I, we'd started the site after covering immigration a number of places. I'd been a reporter in Beirut and I'd worked in the US Covering immigration issues and Max had been a reporter in Cairo. We've been connected, but we were both in the Middle east and he came back to the US at the same time me and also covered immigration in Denver and in Pennsylvania and different places. And when Trump came into office in 2017, we felt that there was a real lack of local coverage of immigration issues. There was a huge emphasis on what was happening at the border and what was happening in D.C. but no one was really covering how these huge shifts were playing out locally in big cities where most immigrants actually live and, and where these policies are being felt most acutely. And the reason for that is that local news has been decimated across the US and really across the world over the last 10 to 20 years. You know, the business model collapse of news has more acutely affected local news organizations. And they've been shuttered, oftentimes hoovered up by hedge funds and private equity and. And their newsrooms have really suffered severe cuts. And often the first people who lose their jobs are the beat reporters, the people with a deep, nuanced understanding of the issues. And that meant that immigration reporting at the local level really just didn't exist. So in New York, all these things were happening and there weren't really reporters on the ground who could cover it. So we felt there was a real gap and a hole to be filled in providing sustained local coverage of immigration issues. But both of us had had these experiences covering immigration. I had been a reporter in Lebanon, and I'd often go to the border with Syria and spend the whole day speaking to someone about their story and why they came to Lebanon and the traumatic things that happened to them. Then I would go back to my office in Beirut and write a story in English that that person would never read or consume. So we wanted to create a site that would do things differently, that the people at the center of the stories would also be the readers of the stories. So we launched in 2018 with that as the main mission and main goal. And over the past six or seven years, we've built a site that publishes in English, Spanish, Chinese, Haitian Creole, and distributes the news via WhatsApp, WeChat on Nextdoor, and really spends a lot of time listening to immigrant communities in New York trying to understand what, where they get their news, how they get their news, and providing information that's responsive to that and doing investigative work that's also meeting that need and holding people accountable around the issues that they care about. And to fund that work, you know, we rely mainly on philanthropy. You know, the business model of news has really collapsed. And there's been a huge movement here in the US and to some extent around the globe of nonprofit news. So this is news organizations founded as 501s with a charitable mission that seek grants from foundations and individual donors to really sustain their mission. Because the idea that journalism is a public good and that the market can't really bear the cost of journalism has really created this understanding that we need to fund it the way we fund libraries, universities and. And other things that don't have a market case but are really necessary for a civically engaged and functioning population.
- [06:03]
D
Now, I know you work with some of the bigger news organizations and you play stories with them, and they, I presume they Co fund many of those stories with you. You have your own website, but how are you reaching? For example, if I'm a Haitian living in New York, how do you connect with that person?
- [06:21]
C
We do. You know, since our founding we've done partnerships with the Guardian, the Daily Beast, the New York Times, you know, many other sites, ProPublica, but really our kind of core mission and the people that we're really trying to serve are low wage immigrants here in New York City. And the way that we do that is we go out to the community in person and we listen. So we really spend a lot of time trying to understand the information ecosystems amongst immigrant communities here in New York. So we conduct these things called information needs assessments. So for the Haitian community, for instance, a few years ago, Caribbean community correspondent Ralph Thomasant, he went to different community groups here in the city, he tabled at events, he went to cultural events, and he surveyed people and asked them, where do you get your news? How do you feel about the existing news ecosystem? What are the kinds of things that you want to see from a news source and how can we build kind of ongoing, lasting relationships? And we did that for Haitian immigrants. We've done that for, you know, non Spanish speaking Caribbean immigrants, for Chinese immigrants, for Spanish speaking immigrants. The Spanish speaking immigrants was actually the first study that we did and really was the kind of framework through which we built out this work. They came back to us with three very clear findings. The first was that folks felt that whenever they were in the news, they were always portrayed as either a victim or a criminal. There was no nuance in their portrayal. The second thing that folks said to us was that they felt that the main thing that they were craving was accessible information about how to navigate New York City. You know, news you can use service journalism. And three, that they were getting most of their news through WhatsApp, informal WhatsApp groups. So in response to that, we built a two way WhatsApp news service where we sent out a newsletter once a week in Spanish on WhatsApp and fielded questions from people on a regular basis. So now we have a dedicated community correspondent who's listening intently into, you know, what people are sending him via WhatsApp, responding to people's questions, bringing those findings to the newsroom. And then that's driving the types of stories that we're publishing in Spanish. And then we do the same thing in Chinese on WeChat for non Spanish speaking Caribbean immigrants. We do the same thing on next door. So that's how we're really kind of building these ongoing listening channels where we can really understand the evolving needs of the community.
- [08:55]
D
I just have your audience. What kinds of stories have residents have cut through, seem vital to them?
- [09:03]
C
Yeah. So obviously, as you can imagine right now, there's a lot of confusion. People really want to understand whether or not they're eligible for deportation and what the latest policies coming out of the White House really mean. So we're publishing a number of guides, resources, a number of questions that we got on our WhatsApp recently was, should I go to my immigration court hearing? So immigration court in the US is, you know, the system that you go through if you're applying for asylum. It can often take years, but sometimes people get arrested by ICE and deported at those, at those hearings. So, you know, we spoke to a number of attorneys. We publish a guide in English and Spanish and distribute that via WhatsApp. It is one of the most read stories on the site. So those are the type of pieces that people really need right now, actionable information. But in addition to that, we're also doing investigative reporting. So, you know, we found three individuals who were arrested in the Bronx and sent to Bukele's Secot prison in El Salvador as part of this scheme that the Trump administration launched a few months ago. And we found that, you know, these three individuals had no criminal record and were taken even though they weren't the intended targets, according to the family and things that the ICE agents said when they were arresting them. So these are the types of stories that come through building long term relationships with the community and really understanding what their needs are and having that trust and hearing about these types of instances directly from people as well.
- [10:38]
D
The other interesting thing is, you know that while many people who are migrants in the U.S. especially first or second generation, are feeling pressured and concerned about what the administration has planned for them. Actually, others who are settled in the US Even in places like New York, did vote for. They see in him somebody who maybe was more aligned with sometimes their religious beliefs or maybe we imagine that every migrant is on the left, whereas many are not on the left. And traditional communities have somehow sided with Trump as well. Does it make it complicated? Because actually some of your constituents have a more nuanced view on what is good and bad and what is right and wrong.
- [11:21]
C
100%. Yeah, it's a great question. So we sent a bunch of reporters out to the polls on election day. We focus, as you can probably tell, we focus on these three main communities, Spanish speaking immigrant community, Chinese immigrant community, and the Caribbean Immigrant community. So we sent our community correspondents out to the polls on election day to speak to naturalized citizens, voters who were voting that day. Often, you know, folks speak in Spanish and Chinese. And almost everyone that we spoke to was voting for Trump. So as the day was wearing on, we had like a pretty clear indication of where the sentiment of New York was at ultimately. New York voted, I think 40% for Trump. And the main increases that Trump saw in his vote compared to the last election were in immigrant communities in New York. And the main two areas that people mentioned were they were frustrated about the economy and inflation and, and they were frustrated about rising crime and homelessness in New York. And these tensions, you know, the way that the vote has shifted in New York has really been driven by a huge number of asylum seekers coming to New York City and creating a lot of tension between long standing residents, as you said, and the more recent arrivals, often kind of exasperated by politicians in the ways that people have been speaking about the asylum seekers arriving in New York. So it has created a very complicated situation for us in that a lot of our readers are Trump supporters and a lot of our readers are folks who are really petrified of what the Trump administration is doing right now. And sometimes they're both, they're both Trump supporters who are afraid of being deported. So the way that we've really tried to navigate this is that we're trying to lean into that complexity and really focus on the issues that a lot of people have said are their main drivers for feeling upset with the status quo. So public safety is a really good example. Immigrant communities really feel that they're bearing the brunt of a kind of crime wave in New York when the data just doesn't really support that. The macro data in New York is that crime is generally down in the city. So we're really digging into, like, why do people feel that way, going to the communities, asking people where does this feeling that they're living in, like an unruly city where crime can happen at any moment? How does that come to pass when the data just doesn't really support that? So we're working on a number of stories right now that are really interrogating those types of questions. And we're hoping to lead into the complexity and be a space for our communities to have these difficult conversations.
- [14:12]
D
And Maz, maybe you could tell listeners a couple of things that reflect what's happening in New York that you're working on at the moment. Yeah.
- [14:20]
C
So really we're trying to, as you mentioned, understand this shift. So we're working on a few stories where we're following up with people who were Trump voters, maybe for the first time in this last election, and checking in on how they're feeling about how the Trump administration is performing and if it met their expectation. So we'll be following a few people over the course of the year to really see how they feel about the ongoing administration. And we're working on just ongoing service journalism to really support the community and navigating the constant shifts and things that are happening. So we're putting out explainers and guides about all the different policies that the Trump administration has been coming out with recently and the number of court cases on tps, daca, birthright citizenship, all of these different cases, how they affect people on a day to day basis. And yeah, really following up on, you know, the folks that have been taken due to the Alien Enemies act and sent to El Salvador.
- [15:23]
A
My thanks there to Mazin Sid Ahmed for that conversation. Next up, we're recommending another city focused podcast to add to your list once you finish this episode of the Urbanist, of course. The series is called Streets in the sky and it aims to understand how deviations from local conceptions of the home affect the well being of those living in modern tower blocks all over the globe. It was released by Cambridge Public Health, written, hosted by Jonathan Goodman, and produced actually by Monocle's own Lily Austin. I was joined recently by the podcast host, a social scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and I began by asking Jonathan about how he became involved with a podcast about the public health implications of modern housing.
- [16:15]
E
It was kind of an indirect way, so I'm a social scientist by training. I did my PhD in anthropology and I work at a public health institute which is interdisciplinary. So we use insights from different fields and different methodologies to explore major issues in public health, including inequality, the effects of climate change on well being, mental health, and so on. And I've also, I was a journalist before I came to do my PhD and I've always been interested and continue to be interested in science communication. And I met the producer for the podcast at an event and we started talking. We thought it would be a great idea to find a topic and housing and the connection between housing and well being is something that repeatedly comes up in literature. So we explored that and in putting.
- [16:59]
D
Turned into this product, it's called Streets in the sky. And again, explain to us where the title comes from and then we can begin to unpack a little bit about what you've been reporting on.
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E
Yeah, so it's a phrase you hear a lot in the history of architecture over the last hundred years or so. And as homes, houses that stood alone, were demolished to make space for larger tower blocks. There was a concern, I think rightfully, that the streets that people congregated on outside their homes as places of socialization would disappear. So the phrase streets in the sky refers, at least in theory, to the walkways and the hallways in the tower blocks that would serve as those streets.
- [17:41]
D
You've looked at what happened in London, you've looked at what happened in Mumbai, and you've tried to draw from that some conclusions and also some opportunities about what we could do better in the future. But when you came to choose some examples from the past about these questions about how architecture impacts on our health, how did you go about choosing which stories you felt would be the most pertinent? The ones that would let us understand the kind of what's at risk?
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E
So the Doddington and Rollo estate in South London came up and there was a fascinating documentary made in the 1970s called where the Houses Used to Be about the creation of that estate and the destruction of the houses that preceded it and the effects that moving to the estate had on the tenants in terms of loneliness, in terms of the spread of disease, in terms of the impact of heat. And completely by coincidence, the producer had a contact who lives now on the Donnington and Rolo estate, which is going through some issues in terms of public spaces. So we thought it would be very interesting to look over essentially what's changed in the past 50 years and sadly, very little seems to have now.
- [18:55]
D
It was interesting listening to the podcast because what comes up is that maybe some of the things that these projects were judged by, which were important as well, sanitation, for example, okay, maybe the sanitation was better than in the previous housing, but people weren't perhaps as good back then. And thinking about the other data, about mental health and about nature and all these things, do you think that people weren't just naive in these projects or that we just didn't understand the impact of breaking down the streetscape?
- [19:26]
E
Both. And I think that continues to be a problem today. And to the extent that we focus on economic savings as opposed to well being, those problems will continue to happen and it's only going to be exacerbated by global warming. The internal temperatures in some of these buildings go to 40, 45 degrees, particularly if the windows are south facing. So, I mean, it's a public health emergency.
- [19:50]
D
You also tell the story of what's happened in Mumbai. But when you come to today and the push for densification in our cities for ever larger towers, wherever you are in the world, what were some of the things that you think that people should be thinking about that planners and civic leaders should be thinking about? When they contemplate adding more tall towers to our cities, they need to take.
- [20:14]
E
Into account a more cohesive view of well being, and that includes mental health, making sure that there are community centers for people to meet in. They also need to be thinking about the risk of infectious disease. While you do have fewer cases of things like cholera, when you have improved sanitation in places like tower blocks, you have increased risk of transmission of tuberculosis, increased risk of transmission of COVID 19 and viruses and bacteria like that. They do very, very well in hot environments.
- [20:43]
D
And just tell me again, just so people understand exactly what you're looking at here, because I imagine that somebody living in a swanky tall tower by the Thames on the 30th floor, where the building quality is incredibly high and there's plenty of air conditioning, they may not recognize the challenges that you're seeing to do with housing in dense, tall environments. Are you thinking particularly that this is about development in poorer neighborhoods or in more developing cities than the example I gave you?
- [21:16]
E
Yes, we're thinking primarily about social housing, but I would think this applies to any form of housing that you need to have consultation with the people who are going to be living in those homes to understand the specific needs that they have. And to the extent that you ignore those, whatever they happen to be, and it will vary by context, you will just end up with more of these same problems.
- [21:35]
D
But it was interesting listening to your podcast because there was a woman speaking about some research that had been done in Mumbai, I believe, where she was saying that actually, yes, you need to listen to people. But even then it's complicated because it depends who you listen to. Because if you listen to all the guys, you'll get kind of one version of what should happen. And if you listen to all the women, you'll get usually a more kind of solution driven, a greater understanding of what needs to be done. So even that, when you say, okay, let's listen to the community, you have to be careful about what is deemed to be the community and who steps up to kind of try and guide these projects.
- [22:11]
E
Yeah, so that's the work of Renita Barden. She's in the Department of Architecture at Cambridge, and she makes that point very, very effectively. But I think the consequence of that is that you basically need. And it sounds over the top, but I think it's true. You need an interdisciplinary team of people. You need people who are not only architects, but you need sociologists, psychologists, in addition to, who are doing strong, well supported qualitative work. Not just going out into the street and asking people what kind of home would you like to live in? But focus groups and published interviews to get an understanding on a context by context basis what is going to work for the population at large.
- [22:47]
D
Now, many cities and many buildings that fall into this difficult category are already present. We're not just talking about future builds. Is there anything that can be done to buildings that don't meet the kind of the needs of people that don't match up to public health needs that are too hot, that aren't considered good places to kind of raise kids? Is there anything you can do retrospectively?
- [23:12]
E
Yes, and I think focusing on the Doddington Rural Estate's an interesting example because the tenants there are very, very keen to have their garden reopened. And it's not even a very big garden. I've visited it and I've spoken with some of the tenants, but. But it's being closed off because of ostensible antisocial behavior with promises of it being reopened, but it hasn't been reopened and therefore there's no place for these people to socialize. But even something like that, as small as it sounds, can make quite a big difference to people's well being. Some outside space that they can get out to, particularly on very hot days. The Borough of Suffolk has an interesting program called the Champions Program, where each local estate puts forward somebody as a champion to speak on behalf of the tenants to make requests to the council about what may improve their lives. So there are definitely ways to mitigate the effects of what we're talking about.
- [23:59]
D
Even retrospectively and perhaps finally. Just tell me the format of the podcast, has it proved fun? Has it proved useful? Are you going to return to the radio studio to make another study?
- [24:13]
E
I think we would like to, actually. There's quite a lot of breadth here going into broader questions about trust in society, which is something I'm very interested in. And yes, that's absolutely something I'd like to do in the future.
- [24:24]
A
My thanks to Jonathan Goodman for joining me here on the Urbanist. Finally today, we look at another publication that is helping residents navigate the city. Founded in 2020, a Mensagem de Lisboa, or Lisbon's Message, is a local media brand name set in the Portuguese capital It was launched with a simple goal, to connect Lisboetas to their city and with one another, to foster a sense of community and belonging. Over the years, it's grown, launching projects in different languages and formats to reflect the rich tapestry of nationalities that make up the city. Monocle's executive producer Carlotta Rebelo, caught up with Caterina Cavallo, the founder and editor in chief of Amen Sejem Lisboa, to find out more about how local journalism can have a transformative impact in the city that it calls home.
- [25:17]
B
We started massaging because we felt there was nothing to connect the Lisboeters, the people from Lisbon, Lisboners, whatever you want to call them, to connect them to the city, which had become like a really gentrified, bigger, more diverse city than we used to know. And although it's very hard for people to understand this, there was no media to connected to the city. There were a lot of media that of course are here, they have their headquarters here, but they didn't cover the city and they didn't cover the people of the city. They covered just the politicians or the economical part of the city. So there was no connection to the real neighborhoods, to the people who live here, who do things. And so this was the idea of massaging from the beginning to bring back this connection, to bring back what people were doing and to let them know each other. I think in general that's what newspapers were there for at the beginning. This is why we believe so much in local press and this is why we never got rid or abdicated from this part, which is to be very small, to tell the small stories of the city to the people of the city.
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F
Now what is interesting as well is that as the project grew, funding also grows and the opportunities to expand come along. You've went in quite some interesting directions. We know cities are diverse places and you quite early on started publishing some of the content in Creole. So that's for some of the Portuguese speaking communities that live in Lisbon, but are from countries where Creole is one of the languages as well, such as Cape Verde, for example, but also in English. And that, I guess is a post pandemic phenomenon with the huge influx, particularly of digital nomads to the city. Tell me about these decisions, to also reach out to other ligebuetas who were not born in Lisbon, but have adopted their city, much like anyone else who moves to a city.
- [27:10]
B
Yeah, you know that we have this motto which is to all the Lizbeth, those who went away, those who came back, those who came to live in Lisbon, those who took it in their heart. So this is like a broader way of seeing the fact that you are from a city. And Lisbon is a very ancient city, it has centuries of history. So the city was always a hub for many things that came to it. And because we are near the sea, this also adds to it.
- [27:36]
E
So.
- [27:36]
B
So it was always this, and it still is. So what we thought from the beginning was that the other media were not covering the diversity of Lisboa. And so we decided to reach the diversity of Lisboa or whatever it is. So we also did Creoles journalism. People who speak Creole also speak Portuguese, but we wanted them to be recognized that they are part of the city. So we published in their second language, because the first language, the official language, is the Portuguese for all these people coming from these African countries that speak Portuguese, but they also have these other, other languages. Creole from Guinea, Creole from Cape Verde, as you said. And also there is a lot of people who also speak English and who have come to live in the city. So from the beginning, we decided to publish in English and we decided to do a newsletter in English. But in this area, even the English speaking community is very diverse. You have the immigrants who come for economical reasons. We also have like kind of the expats who come to live for a while. Then you have people who come because they are kind of refugees, even from rich countries. You can have that now more than ever. And so we decided to do a newsletter for these kind of expats and people who came not for economical reasons, but we still have to reach the other part of the community. We are a very small team, and that's why it's been very hard to get that. But that's a proof also that it's not one size fits all, not even in the media. The more diverse the city or the country or the place where you live is, the more you have to adapt to these kind of new communities that are there. This is a pitfall. It's not completed already, but what we feel is that this is the new world and we have to be where they are.
- [29:19]
F
It is interesting what you mentioned there, because our listeners are familiar with the latest developments in Portuguese politics. And we know that in the last two election cycles, immigration was a contentious topic, and still is, which has been, to put it in a nice way, has been weaponized by forces on the political spectrum more towards the right. And it's interesting then to hear your efforts to include the immigrant community in the city. And I guess I'm just curious, you know, how the human centric stories that you're telling in Mensajing help counter these polarizing narratives that we're seeing elsewhere at a national level.
- [29:58]
B
We would like it to be more of that. We would like it to be exactly what we also wanted from the beginning, which is to provoke empathy through knowledge. There is this feeling that we have that people don't know each other. And the fact that they don't know each other led them to have these ideas about other people. If they look the other people in the eyes, they would change their opinions. And this is a very Portuguese feeling because you know, that Portuguese are more, more warm than some other countries. In the northern Europe, for example, we never thought this anti immigration flow would come here, but it has come. So what we do is exactly that. We show the stories of people who struggle, we show the stories of people who also succeed. We show the stories of humanity and believing, I don't know if it's a hope that we have, with the feeling that that could change a bit the way the people feel. We have an example that I can tell you. We published chronicles of a homeless man who had been living in the streets for about a year. And he was a marvelous writer. And he wrote for us these 12 chronicles about his life, very firsthand, very human, saying what he felt, what he saw, how other people treated him, what he thought about himself. And this provoked huge reaction in the community. People said, we will never look at a homeless man, a homeless woman, the same way we did before. And this is exactly what we as a mission had from the beginning, to provoke that idea that people are all the same. We have the same problems, we all want to be happy. And of course there is evil in the world, but most of the people just want to thrive and to have a life, a happy life. So it is our hope that that happens. It hasn't been proven yet because the extreme right is rising. But actually the extreme right is rising in Portugal, also in the lower income parts of the society, because they feel very much left away by the elites and by the politicians. So it's kind of a vicious circle that the people who are left alone hate the other people who come and that are just as left alone as them. But since they don't know the circumstances, this is what provokes. It's the evil of misunderstandings. And that's what I feel media should do. Media should stop playing this blaming game and should put their feet on the ground and understand the societies and the communities that we Live in.
- [32:32]
F
Well, that point of the power that media can have and journalism can have in building trust is at the core of our profession and what we do. And when you were talking earlier about the importance of these human centric stories and of getting people to meet one another face to face, you took that beyond your reporting and created then an actual real life, in person event to continue this core side of mensaging. This was to create a massaging live, which is basically bringing all these stories together in a theater. Tell us about that project and how that was a way of going back to this idea of engaging the community and bringing everyone together.
- [33:16]
B
Yeah. So we started this massage in live monthly editions in the municipal theater here in Lisbon. And our idea from the beginning was not to have the journalists on stage. That has happened a lot in live journalism, but we didn't want to do that because we didn't want to give journalists and journalism the center stage up front. We were on the backstage curating the stories that people themselves, our characters, people had been on. Our stories would take on stage. And this was, from the beginning, a very interesting way of editing, because you had to edit the way that people talked. You had to edit the way that the flow of the various stories on stage would go. And this like to tell you practically how it was. It was 10 minutes of each story told by the person who lived that story. So we had an amazing features. We had the case of a couple. He was from Cape Verde originally, and she was a gypsy woman. A woman. And they weren't allowed to marry. And they had to run away for two times from the family. From her family to marry, to just, you know, leave their love. And we had a story of a guy who plays rap on trains and on the metro. And he played a song for us telling his story. We had the story of a guy who tries to understand the language and the words of Lisbon. We had the story of a guerrilla gardener who does little gardens in places that are left by the municipality. So a lot of stories. And the power of this is that people are telling them on stage. So it is a bit dramatized, but it is with people that come to see these stories and to be emotioned by them. And they felt like we created a community between the people who are on stage who told these stories. Minsag's team was on the backstage. And also the people who came, like the spectators and people who were there, told us amazing ideas. That they felt a community, that they felt part of the city, that this also brought them a new way of looking into journalism more trustful. It also brought them a hope in life that people can be good, that people can thrive, that people can have hope, basically. So the hope on stage gave them hope on the public. So it was an amazing seven months we did once per month. It was very heavy because we had to plan and put people on stage and curate them and rehearsal with them. But then nobody said no, which is also very interesting thing. So everybody wanted to tell their stories on stage, even people that didn't ever step on a stage. It was so amazing that we are continuing it and we are going to do a bigger event next year with live journalism like this.
- [36:05]
A
Caterina Cavallo, Editor in Chief of Amen se Jean de Lisboa in conversation with Monocle's Carlotta Rebelo. And that's all for this week's episode of the Urbanist. You can follow us for new editions of the show every week. And you can subscribe to Monocle magazine for reports on all things design, architecture and urbanism too. Just visit monocle.com the Urbanist is produced by Carlot Trabello and by David Stevens, who also edits this show. I'm Andrew Tuck. Goodbye and thank you for listening. City Lovers.